CLEANING UP
Where, oh where does the space go? An established system tends to eat up hard drive bytes somewhat mysteriously, and if you’re obsessive about watching your drive stats, you may be wondering what’s going on. We can’t tell you precisely, although there are a few obvious culprits to look for if you’re getting too low for that big app install. First, and most prevalent, is System Restore points. These have the potential to be huge on their own, but if you’re doing frequent installs, your Windows system may be making loads of them, and keeping a needless archive. Disk Cleanup helps you delete all but the most recent. To find the option, open up an Explorer window, right-click your OS partition (or just your C: drive), select “Properties > Disk Cleanup > Clean Up System Files,” then head to the “More Options” tab. Disk Cleanup can also clean up temporary files and the like, although you may not save a vast amount of space this way.
So where are the hogs? The best way to find out is to use a visual method, rather than poking through Windows Explorer poring over file sizes. For this you have two primary choices: TreeSize Free ( www. jam-software.com/treesize_free) and WinDirStat ( http://windirstat.net). TreeSize feels very much like a natural extension of Windows Explorer. Install it, and it runs from a context menu; right-click a folder or drive, fire it up, and it very quickly trawls through, and finds out exactly what’s inside, offering you the option of reopening as an administrator if any of your files are locked down. It then lists your folders by their size, with a handy bar graph indicator in the background. Drill down into the largest folders, and you’ll find your files—you can right-click them for a standard Explorer context menu, but be careful not to delete anything you don’t explicitly know the meaning of.
WinDirStat is a similar tool, but infinitely cooler in that it ramps up the visual finery to a huge extent. Give it a run, select your drive (or “All local drives” if you want to be unnecessarily thorough), then wait as it laboriously traverses your disk in search of meaty files—it’s certainly nowhere
near as fast as TreeSize. When it’s done, though, you’ll see the benefit: a color-coded map of your entire drive, with rectangles representing the size of files, collected into larger rectangles that represent folders. Click a big file and check the status bar to see exactly what it is, and right-click to find a context menu that will help you open the folder in Explorer or copy its path to your clipboard. Click a folder or file in the top left pane, and it highlights it in the visual view, or use the top-right pane to hunt down files of particular types. They’re listed, by default, in order of the size those files take up, so it’s a good way to discover the spacemunching culprits.